Some of you who follow netbsd-bugs@ may noticed that over the past two
days we closed around 270 PRs (problem reports). That's quite a lot, and
I thought I might as well tell you what lead to that...
A few developers and myself had an idea to give a shot to something we
called a NetBSD Bugathon -- we figured if we could combine efforts
together, we could address some of the thousands of PRs we managed to
get open in the 13 or so years of NetBSD action so far.
So we did... we got on IRC (#NetBSD-code on irc.freenode.net if you're
interested) and started looking for PRs we knew how to deal with; slowly
more people came aboard, and we ended up brainstorming solutions to
various problems, solving them as we went. The word spread quite fast
and we suddenly had a few users helping us with the work as well.
All in all it's been fun, and the results are quite amazing; with
about 30 developers and 20 users we managed to get the number of "open"
PRs to below 4000 -- we started with almost 4200! -- in fact, the
results were so surprising given the short notice (if "meet you on IRC
in 12 hours" is a notice :), that we decided to let you know about
this, so you could take part the next time we do it.
Which is why I am going to ask you to reserve the October 7-8 weekend,
for that's when we'll be holding the next NetBSD Bugathon (oh, yeah,
"Reloaded!" ;) -- you are all welcome to join us, to help with the bug
hunting and fixing, or just to enjoy the atmosphere.
Keep in mind it'll be a great time to discuss live about features you
want to see, stuff that you'd like changed, problems you're seeing,
etc., or even your own set of "pet PRs" you'd *finally* like to see
resolved!
More information is available online:
http://www.NetBSD.org/hackathon/
And if someone wants to see how the netbsd-bugs@ mailing list looks like
after 2 days of non-stop work:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-bugs/2006/09/
(scroll down to 09/23/2006 and 09/24/2006... yeah, we should do
something about the archive format. ;)
Thanks to everyone who helped during the weekend making NetBSD better,
and hoping to see you all there. Remember:
October 7-8, 2006 (Saturday-Sunday, two weeks from now!)
irc.freenode.net
#NetBSD-code
Have a great week,
-e.
--
Elad Efrat